Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought
Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought ''is a book by Martin Jay seeking to explore the development of theories and perspectives on human sight and vision in French intellectual development and how those theories and perspectives shaped science, culture, and history. Jay contends that vision is one of our most prized senses, and that cultures are often built around it because it is capable of transmitting more information than most of the other senses; this has often been a contentious point and Jay attempts to summarize the debate. Chapter One Sight has the ability to represent a great deal of information at any given moment, and as such it has often been prized in society; the ability of sight to grant distance from the sensory subject has also made it the source of empiricism and objectivity. However, it has not always been championed as a liberating sense. Jay cites Plato's famous cave allegory, in which he suggests that what we see may simply be fabrications or imitations of reality and not objective reality itself. For this reason, though sight has often been conceived of as the most powerful and noble of the senses, it has also been the debate of much contradiction and disagreement. Sight can be both concrete and abstract, and depending on the situation it could be accurate or inaccurate as well. Jay poin ts out that the visual art of the time often reflects and influences the development of society; visual imagery was often used to convey meaning to illiterate members of society in the Middle Ages, and the mathematical aspects of Renaissance art influenced that period's vision as well. The vision of these periods, with its focus on a singular, god-like viewpoint, could even be argued to influence capitalism and politics, making the world appear to be both visible and understandable from one static perspective. During the scientific revolution, Jay claims, visuals become proof positive of concepts and ideas, serving as an objective arbiter of what is true and what is not. Technology also becomes important in the development of vision. Johann Gutenberg's printing press had a significant impact on the development of vision because it linked "perception to verbalization" and created a greater sense of individualism and autonomy; the spread of knowledge meant that the lower classes were less dependent on the educated minority (p. 67). Rene Descartes, like many scientists and philosophers of his day, championed the visual observation of evidence and empiricism, supporting the development of technologies designed to give greater power to human sight (telescopes, microscopes, etc.) and suggesting that sight is both how we may physically and psychologically interact with the world. In this way, he begins to move away from vision as "resemblance" toward the concept of vision as "representation", though this perspective would come to be challenged (p. 80). Chapter Two During the Enlightenment, vision is held up again as the "noblest sense" (p. 85). This primacy of vision was the dominant perspective but it did not go unargued. Jean Starobinski, in his work ''The Living Eye, ''was relatively unsuspicious of vision and the concept of the gaze. In Starobinski's view, vision was tied to power, as in the king who had a godlike position and ability to see over his kingdom. Jean-Jacques Rousseau conceptualized vision in terms of transparency and opacity and argued that vision would require the ability to go beyond what was immediately present, to pull back the facade and unveil a truth. Without that ability, humanity could not advance. William Molyneux raisd the question of whether the mind could see without vision and if different senses represented different understandings of the world that must be combined into one comprehensive perspective. He was not alone - Denis Diderot and others suggested that other senses (i.e. touch) could provide just as much if not more information than sight and may serve to actually connect the individual to the world, rather than distance them from it. Over time, the faith in sight espoused by the Enlightenment began to waver. Starobinski proposes that the revival of a "neo-Platonic desire for an ideal beauty" that cannot be seen through normal means and the "valorization of darkness" served to challenge this perspective (p. 108). Moreover, technology acted as a disruptive force that served to make the already complex idea of visual experience even more multifaceted. Urbanization and the development of cities created a sensorially overwhelming situation in which much of the city was rendered "illegible" due to the influx of information. The development of fashion and style served not only to provide visual distinction between the massees and the wealthy but also to give the masses visual goals to which to aspire. Inventions such as the daguerrotype fostered a desire for the consumption of images among the mass audience and led to the "democratization of visual experience" and the increase of photographs of "low subjects" such as members of the underclass (p. 122). The importance of these technologies cannot be overstated. Just as Haraway suggests that technology can be used to augment one's humanity and redefine identity, so too does Jay contend that these technologies served to create a more level playing field. Even technologies such as artificial lighting affected vision, allowing for standardized work hours and the development of nighttime entertainment. These technological developments not only called into question the artistic merits of photography and the daguerrotype but also their connections to the world that created them. Questions about the development of photography and its relationship to the actual truth of the world, as well as how that relationship influences society and culture, were present. Sontag writes about the ability of the camera to capture moments in time as they happened through the editorial glance of the photographer, a theme that recurs throughout Jay's work. According to Jay, photography brought with it an assumption of "fidelity to the truth of visual experience"; while it was not necessarily genuine reality it was a powerful analogue and as the technology developed it made up for the shortcomings of seeing in previous technological iterations (p. 126-128). Technological developments such as retouching and altering photographs did not help to quell the discussion. Joel Snyder is one of the writers who questions the ability of the photograph to match human vision, contending that vision is not confined by rectangular borders and limited dimensions; the nature of the photograph is such that it can keep everything visible and in focus but the eye is not able to do so. The eye can, however, do things that photography cannot, such as track motion and establish temporal relationships between what is seen. Other writers argued that the visual fidelity of photographs was not proof of historical accuracy, though it may potentially make us more aware of what the eye sees. However, photographs by their nature take fleeting moments and make them permanent, calling further into question the significance of individual events. Regardless of misgivings and skepticism over the medium, Jay states, photography continued to overtake painting as the dominant visual form, though both forms influenced each other. Photography led to the presentation of replicas of existing art in museums, increased exposure and representation of the lower members of society, and was useful in other forms of public discourse asuch as advertising and surveillance. These changes challenged the existing concepts of vision and contributed further to the ongoing discourse. Chapter Three In the nineteenth century, science moved toward the physical aspects of human sight. This led to a replacement of the concept of "lumen" - outside, natural light from a divine source - to the concept of "lux", which is an internalized light that comes through the "eye of the beholder" (p. 151). This served effectively to increase viewer autonomy and also to move vision away from a "monocular" toward a "stereoscopic" form of vision (p. 152). It also served to create numerous new perspectives on vision and sight, particularly symbolism and post-impressionism. Symbolists attempted to create connotative forms of the mysterious, which post-impressionists looked to create works that were heavily geometric in nature and strove for a perfect form. Paul Cezanne contended that lived human perspective is neither fixed nor geometric and sought to eliminate the distance between the viewer and that which was viewed to underscore how we interact with the world. The ongoing doubts over the role of vision led to the creation of the modernist aesthetic, which was concerned primarily with formal optical values such as light, color, space, and form. Rather than vision attempting to simulate tactile sensation, visual art "reduced itself entirely to what was visually verifiable"; critics of the modernist movement attempted to focus instead on pitting "the pody against the eye" (p. 160-161). The anti-art movement arose out of this discourse, where aesthetic status was granted to mass-produced objects that were then in turn presented as art. When removed from their everyday context and put into the museum, these objects were conferred with artistic value simply via context; the movement attempted to criticize the dominance of vision and aesthetics and, according to Jay, had significant political implications. Symbolists attempted to view objects as connotative in nature, breaking down all the components of an object as serving allegorical functions. In modernism, the objects were what they appeared to be as represented. However, the modernist perspective, which was obsessed with vision, ultimately served to inform anti-visual perspectives. Realists rejected the modernist perspective of an omnipresent narrator that attempted to describe the visual through words, while Naturalists sought to be faithful to the fleeting nature of an objective world (p. 180). Formalists like W.D. Shaw suggested that the images created by an artist can themselves become reality and turn actual reality into the Platonic "shadow", creating a new dimensional relationship (p. 180-181). In effect, mediated reality can be come more real to the observer than actual reality. Henri Bergson becomes one of the first modern philosophers to question sight, suggesting that Western philosophy has been heavily influenced by and preferential toward visual data. Historicist perspectives like that of Friedrich Nietzsche argued for a vast number of perspectives without a central god-like viewpoint (indeed, Nietzsche once famously argued that God was dead) and contended that objective, detached observation was impossible, with vision being an active process. Bergson builds upon this by suggesting a greaterconnection between the body and mind in which the body is the only constant in all of perception as individuals navigate through the world; this created "body memory" in which the body builds upon past experience and triggers memories based on previous sensory data (smells of childhood, etc.); in Bergson's view, many intellectuals ignored the importance of "lived action" (p. 195). These experiences, Bergson argues, are not immediately or "easily available to vision" and can be more easily captiuired by other senses (p. 197). In this view, the cinema is kmore akin to human experience due to the addition of the temporal element that connects images together; Jay argues that this characteristic helps to transcend a dependence on vision. In Bergson's view, single, still images cannot replicate the world around us but "many diverse images" from different sources could well do so (p. 203). These perspectives continued to influence the discourse over vision in the following years. Chapter Four The challenges of war cast the notion of the nobility of sight into question, destabilizing many perspectives on vision. The primacy of vision, or ocularcentrism, was challenged both from Enlightenment and counter-Enlightnment perspectives. Georges Bataille's perspective on the matter was influenced by wartime experience and was suitably violent - he was interested in the "violent termination of vision", and destruction of vision and symbols of vision was a recurring theme in his works, which removed the eye from positions of nobility and cast it among the basest forms of human existence (p. 220-221). Battaile challenged the notion advanced by Freud and others that sight served to advance the human race in the evolutionary process, suggesting that the sun that provided light for sight was a contradictory and undesirable conundrum that could both be positive and rational when not looked at directly and destructive when the observer did just that. Battaile influenced many other intellectual perspectives such as Surrealism, the members of which practiced "radical nihilism" as influenced by the horrors of war; while ultimately disorganized and undisciplined the movement in general attempted to combine elements of reality "belonging to categories that are so far removed from each other that reason would fail to connect them" (p. 240). Such perspectives often tried to recreate the imagery found in dreams and challenged "truths about the creation of visual beauty" as they attempted to recapture the visual perspective of innocent youth (p. 243). Surrealist art challenged the expectations and assertions of vision and sought to create works that were essentially impossible in the real world through the use of different visual effects. Photography changed the classical Surrealist perspective by taking it away from the perspective of innocence and toward visual information that was altered and fabricated. Cinema, on the other hand, was often conceptualized as a group dream in a Surrealist perspective and criticized for temporarily taking away our humanity and individualism, reducing us to "nothing more than two eyes riveted to ten meters of white screen" (p. 255). While Surrealists did not have a great deal of success in making films, their thought nonetheless was implemented into many different films, including ''Un Chien Andalou, a film written by and starring famed Surrealist Salvador Dali, in which a young woman's eye is cut open in the first scene and the narrative thereafter is disjointed and dreamlike. In Surrealism, the eye was a core symbol and was often put into harmful and degrading situations designed to challenge the privileged notion of vision. As such, the Surrealist perspective further questioned the legitimacy of a vision-centered perspective. Chapter Five During the 1930s, French philosophy was heavily influenced by phenomenology, which attempted to observe the "natural standpoint" in the context of "empirical facts" to more fundamentally understand reality (p. 266).Phenomenology once again prizes vision by searching for rational assertions within it, though it later evolves to discuss the "exploration of impure existence" (p. 268). Philosophers like Martin Heidegger criticized this push back towards ocularcentrism and contrasted the Greek sense of wonder (leaving things alone) with a sense of creativity and desire to know why things were the way they were. Heidegger contended that light and vision alone do not create understanding and openness but "presuppose it" (p. 274-275). Heidegger and other philosophers suggested a typology of philosophy with two main kinds - epistemological and ontological; the difference between the two was the distance of the observer (distant and embedded, respectively). Levin built upon this by adding assetoric knowledge that was "monocular", "inflexible", and "unmoving" when compared to alethic knowledge, which was "inclusionary", "horizonal", and "caring" (p. 275). Jean-Paul Sartre combines these different critiques into one position against ocularcentrism, taking a perhaps psychologically agressive position against vision. Sartre's thought began with a ''le regard absolu, ''or a god-like perspective that sees and judges all; he sought pure transparency though he could not reach it. Sartre suggested that consciousness is opaque if it is tied to a "self-reflecting ego", true consciousness must by nature be "transparent" and not beholden to positivity (p. 282). In this way, he argues, images can be analogical - they can create analogies - but they cannot themselves be reality. Moreover, Sartre argues that there may be certain truths that are available to be revealed by those who are not within the fray. Our situated viewpoints provide a major obstacle to understanding the whole, in Sartre's view, and we may see things only on a limited horizon. Maurice Merleau-Ponty sought to "restore the world of perception" by suggesting that scentific inquiry came from perception rather than being a diametrically opposed antithesis, and considered perspective not only how someone looks at an object but also as a part of he object itself. He questioned Sartre's separation of imagination and perception, and viewed shared significance as useful and important to communication. Merleau-Ponty took issue with the status quo, which classified empiricist and intellectualist critiques of vision. In the empiricist perspective, perception is a stimulus from without imposed on a passive sensory organ and was essentially observation; the intellectualist perspective posited that subjectivity was the source of how we saw the world. He rejected both perspectives, as they each implied distance between the observer and the world while he sought immersion within it, advocating for a community with shared meanings and cooperation. Later, Merleau-Ponty would move away from Gestalt psychology but would keep his focus on visual media because the eye "opens the soul to that which is not the soul", though he also contended that painters (and presumably others who created visual media) did so through the creation of skewed, narcisisstic visions of themselves (p. 314-315). Rather than splitting up the world into the "viewer and the viewed", he divided it into the "visible and the invisible" to restore the world's sovereignty as an object distinguishable from that which is represented (p. 319). Vision, in Merleau-Ponty's view, was ideal for creating notions of the self, but a distinction existed between the actual self and the self perceived by the world. He contended that language was ultimately necessary to invoke meaning, a perspective that would be taken up by others. Chapter Six Much of the work pertaining to vision thus far has related to the way that the individual sees the world. Comparatively little has focused on how external factors influence that relationship. To begin this portion of his analysis, Jay turns to psychoanalysis and particularly to the work of Freud, who suggested that the desire to know was tied to the desire to see. Freud suggested that this was an infantile and highly sexually-motivated desire that led to voyeurism and other activities deemed as perverse. Freud also assigned phallic and sexual connotations to sight and how individuals interacted with the world while still championing it as the sense that advanced humanity beyond its animal state. Influenced by Freud but not completely supporting him, Jacques Lacan built upon this through his interest in the morbidity of vision and its role in psychotic breakdowns and murders. Lacan was also heavily influenced by Alexandre Kojève, who conceptualized the development of human consciousness as filling in a gap present within the subject, a tactic that requires interaction with an "other" that is reduced to an "image of the self" (p. 346). This leads to a view of the other as not part of the self, which is "unsublatable in a grand unity of subject and object" (p. 346). Drawing upon this influence, Lacan rejected ego-based psychology, suggesting that the ego was illusionary and served to alienate the individual from the world. Therefore, violence towards others could be considered as projected violence and punishment toward the self. Despite this, Lacan was heavily skeptical of ocularcentrism, suggesting that the unconscious must stop acting as a mirror in order for a subject to reach maturity. Lacan introduced the concept of scotomization, which referred to the ability of the ego to reject anyhting that might challenge it; the ego attempted also to defend itself through foreclosure, another Lacanian term that referred to the denial of certain things that may not have actually happened. Scotomization, Lacan contends, creates "blindspots" when an individual is ocnfronted with a threat, while forclosure simply casts out a rejected image which may return as a hallucination later. In this paradigm, Lacan contends, psychosis occurs when the linguistic realm of the mind is interrupted by visual or imaginary characteristics. Lacan took a more complex view of sight overall, suggesting that it was "labryinthine in nature" and that the gaze is facilitated not just by the viewer's desire to look but also by the "other's desire to show itself" (p. 367). Jay summarizes Lacan's position by suggesting that vision goes beyond projection and mirroring toward the desire for the other. The subject is crossed with the vision of the eye, creating a highly symbolic form of vision. Louis Althusser builds upon Lacan by implementing Marixst theory, though he is still somewhat critical of certain forms of Marxism. Althusser's conception of ideology is reliant upon sight, rejecting the notion that science is the "correspondence between a perceptually observed object and its mental reproduction" (p. 374). Real objects, in Althusser's observation, may not be objects of knowledge at all but instead represent a larger collective consciousness which may or may not be false in nature. Ideology is an inherently human concept, and mirroring in this model is not only between an individual and their reflection but also between an individual and a "meta-subject" such as a god; in this analysis any philosophy or life principle with a sole figure at its center is ideological in nature (p. 376). Ideology is by its nature subconscious and can therefore inlfluence our vision of the world. Chapter Seven Jay begins this chapter by talking about the concept of the panopticon, a prison in which everyone and everything is visible. The panopticon was a guidince principle in societal thought because it was believed to be a haven for the introduction of logic and rationalism, as everything in a panopticon was visible and nothing was hidden. However, most antiocularists challenged the notion of this level of surveillance, calling into question its necessity and morality. Michel Foucault was one such scholar who observed the eye in a medical sense as an organ that has "the power to bring a truth to light that it receives only to the extent that it has brought it to light" (p. 393). Science, then, is constructed through visual invasion of subjects - psychologists use sight to probe into a subject's psyche, while medical doctors use vision to look into a body and determine its pathological cahracteristics. Foucault was critical of such an approach, but Jay points out that he never proposed replacing it with a more linguistic approach like most of his contemporaries did. Jay suggests that Foucault believed post-Classical thought was beholden to vision and that vision was considered to be the dominant perspective. He also pointed out that man was essentially considered to be, in the humanist perspective, both the source and subject of knowledge and what was observed. Vision, Foucault seems to argue, could create a system of knowledge without a centralized "sovereign" or "surrogate" - anyone could run a panopticon or conduct surveillance on their community (p. 408). At the same time, Foucault argued that man was trapped in the panopticon of Enlightenment thought and beholden to the perspectives advanced by such thinkers. The gaze, in this situation, becoms a means of control and discipline both in terms of surveillance and social control, yet Foucault again never offers an alternative. Situationists such as Guy Debord attempted to reframe the argument altogether by making it an issue of class distinction, seeking to overthrough bourgeoisie and dominant means and conceptions of vision; Situationists considered consumer commodities to be akin to false idols that were worshipped by society and used these commodities to reappropriate culture for the purpose of turning it against itself. Debord himself did not criticize vision so much as how it operate din society, particularly how it influenced social relationships while reinforcing class distinctions and antagonism. Debord contended that the happiness provided by culture and cultural artifacts was a forgery of actual happiness, and yet visual commodities in the purpose of seeking joy had also become the sole focus of everyday life. Reversing this trend was the goal of situationists and they believed it would lead to intellectual freedom. Jay argues, however, that situationism was troubled from the beginning due to its ideological incoherence and unattainable goal of reversing the status quo. However, Jay also contends that its focus on critiquing social spectacle survives and remains viable in other theoretical forms today; though it may be "detached from its subversive political function", it can also "become a merely descriptive tool to describe current cultural conditions" (p. 433). Together, Foucault and Debord influence further generations of critics by challenging the dominant perspective of objectivity and advancing the notion of acting within a system to change it. Chapter Eight Jay observes that throughout the history of visual discourse, the concept of vision has been extended to not only cover the eye but also the technological apparatuses that augment the eye. This is one of the core issues facing the critique of ocularcentrism, as the notion of creating objects to strengthen and extend the power of vision further legitimizes the approach. This chapter focuses primarily on photography and the cinema through the work of Roland Barthes and Christian Metz. Roland Barthes was primarily interested in the nature of photography and argued that society had revised medieval values and in doing so placed sight at the top of the sensory hierarchy. By trade a semiologist, Barthes suggested that the human body and the gestures it made were viable texts. Sicence, in Barthes' view, interprets vision and the gaze in terms of "information", "relation", and "possession" (p. 441). He suggested that photography had the potential to transcend the notion of myth and can actually be a representation of the world, generally in traumatic situations. Photographs have "obviousness" and connotative qualities, yet they may also contain an "obtuse" meaning that is denotative and goes beyond linguistic description (p. 445). Barthes was concerned primarily with the denotative qualities of photographs and "their analogical rather than semiotic foundation" (p.451). Much like Sontag, Barthes viewed the photograph as death and the creation of a permanent, lasting memory of a fleeting moment; through this photographs served to "ratify the existence of what was" (p. 454). Barthes was more skeptical of film, which he equated to being under a hypnotic voyeuristic spell. Christian Metz would focus on film, and like many others devoting themselves to the study of the medium he attempted to apply scientific structures to it. Metz attempted to explain how the cinema created a sense of realism, arguing that enjoying the cinema was essentially reproducing the ideological characteristics of the cinema (p. 469). The problem, to Metz and other critics of the ''Cahiers ''journal, was not particularly that of theory but rather the cinema itself; particularly, it was the interaction of technology and the "spectatorial consciousness" of moviegoing (p. 472). The camera, to Metz, represents a "bourgeoisie perspective" that reinforces the primacy of vision; it also provides an "ideal vision" that allows the viewer to go wherever a camera cam go (p. 473). Other critics introduced the notion that moviegoers were essentially like the spectators in Plato's "cave" allegory, with limited mobility and watching, eyes forward, as shadows playedout on the wall. In this perspective they rely upon a "superreal sense of reality that cannot be tested" and identify "with the camera eye as transcendental, omniscient subject", causing the observer to focus less on the action and more on the item capturing the action and how it "affects their vision (p. 475). Hence, an audience member may remark upon the quality of the camera work, whether the shot is framed properly, and how clear and sharp the focus is, rather than paying attention to what the camera actually captures. This apparatus theory, which takes the camera equipment and psychological attentions together, suggests that the ideological perspective of the camera causes it to be politically dangerous - the observer is not necessarily passive but has agency only to maintain the status quo and rationalize their position. Metz contends that film viewing is antisocial and uncomplicated, stating that "there is no need" fr the spectator to be seen in the darkned theater, nor is there any need for the film to recognize itself as a knowing object (o. 481). According to Metz, viewers essentially fell in love with the medium of the cinema and fetishized the concept and what it could do. One thing film could do is to create temporal relationships between images, though Metz points out that film by its nature created a fake semblance of life; photography, on the other hand, "maintains the memory of the dead as being dead" (p. 485). The challenges to media and how users interacted with it led to challenge and critique of vision from feminist perspectives. Chapter Nine Jacques Derrida, like many other thinkers in Jay's book, took an antiocular perspective to the concept of vision, but advocated instead for a system of "reading" , in which the observer looks both at the "context and rhetoric" of the object (p. 496). In Derrida's view, both phenomenology and structuralism were problematic, and communication was likened to a mirror that had lost its ability to reflect, suggesting that "writing or the text are not reducible either to the sensible or visible presence of the graphic or literal" (p. 505). Derrida took a postmodern view and refused to privilege one side over the other. Derrida challenged also the notion of the sun and the metaphor that it provided light and meaning, taking into account the biological characteristics and nature of the senses. Derrida's philosophy refuses to advance one sense over another; likewise, images are "just another form of writing" that "dissembles itself as a direct transcript of that which it represents, or of the way things look, or of what they eventually are" (p. 516). Derrida prized dialogue rather than asserting the rightness or wrongness of a perspective. He extended this understanding to the reading of texts, suggesting that photography and other visual forms are ain to writing and must be read and viewed and shared to unpack their meaning and discover the meaning beyond what is immediately depicted and present within the picture. Derrida also had a lot to say about feminism, contendign that feminism that avoided "mimicking the dominant male scopic regime" will avoid simply "inverting the hierarchy", something traditional feminist perspectives did not do (p. 523). Traditional feminism suggested that to be free, women should be like men; in vision terms, freedom meant being the gazer and not the gazed-upon. This was challenged post-1968 by writers like Luce Irigray, who pointed out the importance of the link between "ocularcentrism and phallocentrism" in terms of thought and action, as well as the significance of vision to feminist issues (p. 526). Most feminists from France built upon Derrida's work, suggesting the importance of language and its relationship to the psyche. Irigray critiqued Lacana nd Freud, suggesting that psychoanalysis is based on "voyeurism" and mirroring; in Irirgray's view, mirroring causes women to be trapped in a restrictive landscape in which they are perceived as inferior to men yet forced to live up to them (p. 531-533). The alternative was to break the standard mirror and replace it with one specifically tailored to women, the metaphorical concave speculum; though it may be an invasive mirror it was nonetheless tailored toward women. Irigray criticized vision by contending that women were "always the victims in visual culture", though she and other thinkers speculated that women could legitimately garner pleasure from vision and that a female/lesbian gaze could be relatively harmless to female bodies (p. 536-541). Derrida and the feminist perspective's challenge of having explicitly defined barriers or a monocular, all-seing viewpoint in turn influence postmodernism. Chapter Ten Jay again starts off this chapter by observing that vision is the "master sense" of the modern era, despite the numerous challenges over the years (p. 543). However, the development of postmodernism suggested that images could be "set completely adrift from their referents" and often "precede their referents", essentially turning reality into images (p. 544). Postmodernism teacus us to be "suspicious of single perspectives" that oversimplify a complex world (p. 545). Postmodernism is a paradox in vision for this reason, and Maurice Blanchot contends that "community can never be built on visual interaction", though postmodernism does take into account differing and subjective perspectives (p. 546). Postmodernism by its nature does not prioritize vision, and some postmodernists argue that other senses, such as touch, can create a stronger connection between the individual and the world than does sight. Jean-François Lyotard was skeptical of Lacan's notion of the symbolic and created instead a distinction between discourse and figure. In Lyotard's estimation, discourse was what "normally passes for communication and signification", while figurality "injected opacity into the discursive" through methods such as figures of speech (p. 564). Discourse follows conventional meaning, while figure is beholden to the "visual space of the line" (p. 566). Lyotard was influenced by antiocularist perspectives because of his perspective on the sublime. Lyotard identified the sublime as that which "canot be shown or presented", occurring "when the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept" (p. 582). While both postmodernism and modernism look for the sublime, modernism looks "for something lost" while postmodernism has no issue dealing with the "pain of unrepresentability" (p. 583). However, postmodernism can often be difficult to quantify and observe, and as Jay contends that postmodernism can only "reflect according to opacity", without certainty (p. 586). Conclusion Jay concludes his book by making some final observations about the development of antiocularism and the consideration of sight in French thought. Jay points out that all of the intellectuals discussed in the book were "extraordinarily sensitive to the importance of the visual and no less suspicious of its implications", with distrust a trait widely shared among a diverse array of thinkers and had almost become "second nature" to many philosophers (p. 588-589). Moreover, antiocularism played a significant role in the development of contemporary enlightenment, and Jay contends that despite its often "hyperbolic rhetoric", antiocularism has raised significant questions about "the status of visuality in the dominant cultural traditions of the West" (p. 589). It has set the expectation that thought cannot be divorced from sensory perception and challenged the belief of the eye as an objective and privileged organ, and in doing so has called into question the way we perceive the world and the results. However, Jay also points out that rather than calling for the destruction or the "enucleation of the eye", it may be mor eproductive to call for a more wide-ranging perspective of a "thousand eyes" and a more "dispersed and plural" form of vision (p. 591). It is not enough to simply "demonize visuality" or claim that it is tied to patriarchy or oppression, but rather vision must be taken into account as part of a "polyscopic narrative" as opposed to simply averting vision altogether (p. 592). Jay also points out that a focus on the negative aspects of vision may have hurt the overall discourse, and calls to seek out the "still faintly visible positive side" to salvage useful understanding (p. 593). Vision, Jay contends, can still provide a great deal of insight and perspective to help us to understand the world around us. Category:Books